The use of audio in teaching and examination can be highly beneficial. For example, the use of audio of a person speaking can be useful in determining an examinee's level of comprehension. Audio listening items can also be useful in helping a student improve certain skills such as language learning. The benefit of such audio of speech samples can be significantly diminished when the difficulty of the speech sample in the audio is substantially mismatched with a listener's ability level (e.g., a novice language learner may struggle to understand a native, fast-talking speaker of an unfamiliar language).